Higher Education's Research Focus Is A Prank On Students

Among the many questionable things we learned in college was the art of the prank call. Because we enjoyed listening to them as much as we liked making them, my roommate Chris jerry-rigged a recording device, which also had the benefit of preserving our calls for posterity.

One I particularly enjoyed was when my roommate Dave called the esteemed literary publication, the Yale Review.

Yale Review: Hello, Yale Review.

Dave: Yes, I wrote some poetry that I’d like to submit, but before I bother putting a stamp on it, I’m just wondering if I could read it to you.

Yale Review:Oh… you know, I don’t…

Dave: OK, here it is. I call it “The Road I Didn’t Take.”

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth

Then took the other as just as fair

And having perhaps the better claim

Because it was grassy and wanted wear

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same

Well, what do you think of it so far?

Yale Review:(laughter) I think it sounds a lot like Robert Frost.

Dave: Well he’s really been, I’d say, the biggest influence on my work, and I can’t say that I haven’t read his stuff. But I’m just wondering what you think of it. Is it up to snuff.

Yale Review:The reason I was demurring at even having you bother to take the time to read it to me is that my job doesn’t influence what goes into the Review. They would have published Frost, in fact they did, before…

Dave: But this isn’t Frost. This is me. Okay. I think I’ve got one that fits what you’re looking for. I call it “Taking a Little Break in the Orchard on a Very Stormy Evening.”

Yale Review:(laughter)

Plagiarism isn’t a winning strategy for getting published in a journal. A better strategy, it turns out, is to make stuff up. In an article published last month in Nature, four faculty at the University of Wroclaw in Poland concocted a sham scientist — Anna O. Szust (“fraud” in Polish) — gave her fake degrees and book chapters, and applied to 360 academic journals asking to be an editor. Forty-eight journals appointed her as an editor. Remarkably, four made her editor-in-chief. No journal attempted to contact her university or institute. One journal added her even after “she” submitted a cover letter that said the editor position would allow her to earn a degree that she already claimed on her CV.

Eight of the gullible journals claimed to have requirements to meet standards of quality and ethical publishing, but the other 40 were online journals that charge researchers to publish — fees that typically range from $100 to $400.